The King of Skid Row

The story of a much different Minneapolis, through the words and photographs of one of its most colorful charactersnow in paperback City blue laws drove the liquor trade and its customershard-drinking lumberjacks, pensioners, farmhands, and railroad workersinto the oldest quarter of Minneapolis. In the fifty-cent-a-night flophouses of the citys Gateway District, they slept in cubicles with ceilings of chicken wire. In rescue missions, preachers and nuns tried to save their souls. Sociology researchers posing as vagrants studied them. And in their midst John Bacich, aka Johnny Rex, who owned a bar, a liquor store, and a cage hotel, documented the gritty neighborhoods last days through photographs and film of his clientele. The King of Skid Row follows Johnny Rex into this vanished world that once thrived in the heart of Minneapolis. Drawing on hours of interviews conducted in the three years before Bacichs death in 2012, James Eli Shiffer brings to life the eccentric characters and strange events of an American skid row. Supplemented with archival and newspaper research and his own photographs, Bacichs stories recreate the violent, alcohol-soaked history of a city best known for its clean, progressive self-image. His life captures the seamy, richly colorful side of the city swept away by a massive urban renewal project in the early 1960s and gives us, in a glimpse of those bygone days, one of Minneapoliss most intriguing figuresspinning some of its most enduring and enthralling tales.